“You’ve met Lady Juliet, Mother. We nearly wed.”
The vanity Mother used for her toilette was an ominous sign. I hadn’t seen that many pots and powders since panniers went out of fashion.
She humphed from the depths of her wardrobe. She’d taken over Father’s room after his death and had her own converted entirely for the purpose of storing her many garments. Row upon row of gowns hung from the converted shelving. The majority of them were the stark black and whites she favored, but the older gowns, the ones she was examining at present were as bright as they were ostentatious
My stomach sank with the sneaking suspicion that she was going to choose something from before the turn of the century, and I could feel the humiliation bubbling up in advance.
Mother considered fashion to be an art form. Each piece of her ensemble was carefully considered to achieve a truly magnificent effect. The problem was that no one else shared her vision. Oh, they were polite enough to her face. But behind her back, laughter followed her every move.
My mother was beautiful, but it was an odd, discomfiting beauty if one wasn’t intelligent enough to look for it.
She hadn’t always been this way—so vain. I rather thought my father’s callous disinterest in everything to do with his wife had something to do with her wardrobe statements. Every time he wandered off while she was mid-sentence, every time he failed to return home, every time he ignored her every word, my mother had found a newer, bolder, louder piece to add to her collection. She had spent her entire life screaming in perfect silence. And I was the only one who noticed, who heard.
I fussed with the ornate sleeve of my coat as I finally made my way to the settee. The sounds coming from her dressing room weren’t overly promising—I suppose I wouldoomph, too, if I were being laced into one of her court gowns.
A silver thread had loosened in the seam of my coat, and the temptation to tug at it until the entire garment disintegrated on my body was nearly impossible to resist.
A rustling sound interrupted before I could enact my destruction, and Mother slipped out of her wardrobe with her haggard lady’s maid in tow. I bit back a sigh at the overwrought expression on the girl’s face—probably ought to put the notice back out. This one wouldn’t last long at all.
I couldn’t entirely fault her. Mother had chosen a robe à la française that I strongly suspected was from her debut season. The gown was beautiful, truly, and impeccably preserved. I was certain it had been admired by all in its time. But now it was so dramatic that I could hear the snickers already.
The skirts were too wide Mother had to turn sideways to escape the confines of her wardrobe. A lovely viridian, the hem was decorated with burnished pewter lace nearly a foot wide. It almost certainly cost more than the annual income of a small German principality. The dressmaker had carried the pewter detailing up the skirt in exquisitely embroidered swirls and leaves. The entirety of the stomacher was stitched with intricately detailed vines and flowers; it was truly breathtaking. And the pièce de résistance was the enormous grey wig with matching ribbons, jewels, and ostrich feathers woven throughout that the maid held clasped in both hands.
“Well, darling, shall your mother rouse thetonto raptured awe?”
I rose and sidled up to her with a sincere effort not to crush the skirts and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “You look beautiful.”
“Yes, but will it inspire the proletariat and patricians alike?”
“I cannot imagine how you could do anything else.”
“Splendid. Now, leave me and Marie to our ablutions and see to your sister.”
I nodded and left to find Davina, ignoring the maid’s quiet, “It’s Marianne, Your Grace.” She could sort that out herself.
Dav was already in the drawing room bedecked in massive peacock feathers that splayed out from the embroidered bird on the center of her gown. Her matching mask hung from her wrist as she distractedly plucked at the tassels of the pillow she had plopped across her lap.
“Cacaw,” I muttered at the sight of her.
“Peacocks do not caw,” she informed me in a pert huff.
“How would you know?”
“They scream. It’s sort of an angrymah-mahsound.” Her impression was absurd and almost certainly based in reality.
“When have you met a peacock?”
“Irrelevant,” she said, then set the pillow aside and rose to smooth out my cravat. “When is Cee to arrive?”
A ludicrous story was almost certainly associated with the peacocks. One I had no interest in learning. Often, as long as Dav was unharmed with her reputation more or less intact, it was best to remain ignorant of such things.
I waved away my worries. “Any time now. And Mother should be down in an hour or six.”
“How is she?”
The fireplace called to me. Once I reached the brick hearth, I knocked the coals about with the poker before setting it back in the rack. “No one will be impressed by the height of your plumage, I can promise you that.”
“If she’s already dressed, how much longer can she take?”
